Character Animation Blog

Menu

AM Class 4: First Spline Pass (Blocking Plus)

Another quick week has gone by and it was filled with a lot animation! This week we were asked to begin the Blocking Plus stage of our shot. We have two weeks of blocking plus and then one week of polishing before it is to be turned in. My mentor encouraged us to try and get into smoothed out curves aka “splines” this week if possible. This is the stage of animation where you find out if your blocking was done well enough or if you probably need to go back and breakdown your poses some more. This week, was spent mostly “tying down” the shot as many say. After switching from my stepped keys over to splines, I decided to follow the workflow that many of my mentors have recommended — focus on the core.

My workflow was as follows:
I started out with focusing only on the hips, and center of gravity. I wanted to get the weight shifts and overall base movement all worked out, from there I moved up the spine to the head and then I moved outwards to the arms, hands and fingers. Finally, I did a basic face pass where I added some overshoots and subtle eases on the facial expressions, mouth shapes, blinks and eye darts. The face and hands still have much more work to be done on them. So hopefully next week will be spent doing more work on those areas.

That is pretty much all for this week, stay tuned for next week’s update!